PhD Candidate in American Religion, Duke University.

No book review today, possibly not even this week. I’m deep into fellowship application season. But I stumbled onto a goldmine today that I thought I should share. Apparently, Google has quietly amassed an ENORMOUS database of historical newspapers. http://news.google.com/newspapers We’re talking hundreds of titles in dozens of cities spanning most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While there are many glaring omissions (e.g. NY Times, Washington Post… practically anything that’s still publishing), it has lots of material from defunct small-town papers, old city papers, and especially French Canadian papers. Sometimes, it only has one month of a paper. In other cases, it has decades of print runs. I could see this being an especially useful resource for first- and second-year undergrads writing their first history paper. Like I say, I stumbled into this so I’m happy to hear feedback or reviews from others. I was actually looking for a book called “Pathways of the Holy Land,” when Google brought up this page from the 1875 Crawfordsville Star: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2247&dat=18750720&id=tpAnAAAAIBAJ&sjid=YwQGAAAAIBAJ&pg=1055,6848775